As racial tensions and reports of violence have become prominent in news and social media, U.S. society has been responding, struggling, and changing. This complex political and social situation can be particularly confusing for international students studying at U.S. universities. English language teachers are especially well positioned to create space for exploring this complexity and supporting learners' understanding of these events in light of their historical context. This report on the authors' collaborative reflective practice examines a second language academic literacy course through the lens of multiliteracies (New London Group, ). This approach acknowledges the multilingual, multicultural landscape of the United States and draws on multiple modalities and discourses in literacy education (Cope & Kalantzis, ). The core course novel that is the focus of the current article, A Lesson Before Dying (Gaines, ), is the story of a young African American man during the Jim Crow era who is sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. These teachers noticed that students struggled to put race‐related issues that are central to the text into meaningful historical and social context. The authors responded by situating the novel through inclusion of key supplementary materials on themes such as African American Vernacular English and Black masculinities. The pedagogy challenged racist master narratives that permeate American society, as reflected in both the course novel and current events, and constructed counternarratives. The resources described here are immediately relevant to English language classrooms in the United States at this important historical moment.
Many US K-12 teachers in ethnolinguistically homogenous, rural areas are not adequately prepared to meet the needs of their English language learner (ELL) students. Such educators often lack conceptual understanding of language pedagogy and affective investment in ELLs. The field of language teacher education (LTE) needs research on how to better prepare these teachers to serve ELLs. The teacher educator and lead researcher in this article responded to this need, implementing an LTE pedagogy of embodiment for preservice K-12 teacher-learners. Embodiment refers to ways in which a concept or feeling, related to language pedagogy in this case, is made physically or emotionally tangible. Participants – undergraduates in a TESOL survey course – took part in an embodied ELL lesson, which was rich in tasks that the teacher educator had developed years earlier for her own language learner students. In the context of the university teacher education classroom, teacher-learners participated in this authentic ELL lesson. Data include LTE classroom discourse, focus groups, written reflections, and background questionnaires. Findings reveal that two language learning tasks from the embodied lesson especially enabled teacher-learners’ language pedagogy concept learning. Namely, in a timed reading and video enactment, teacher-learners experienced and reflected on language pedagogy concepts related to task sequencing, collaborative interaction, fluency development, and engagement. The participants performed two distinct roles during the embodied lesson: at some moments, they ‘acted like’ language learners while at others like reflective language educators. These teacher-learners reported increased empathy towards ELLs as a consequence of their participation in the embodied lesson. This research offers insights into LTE pedagogical practices that promote preservice K-12 educators’ learning of language pedagogy concepts and their development of empathy for ELLs. By presenting the notion of an LTE pedagogy of embodiment, we contribute to sociocultural frameworks of learning.
Formal research and scholarship in applied linguistics directly focused on values in language teaching only began to surface at the turn of the 21st century.
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